Chapter 8
The Second Wave
Three years after Gerrit Smith published his intentions, his plan designed to draw three thousand Black New Yorkers north had failed to attract more than a fraction. And this was a plan that Dr. McCune Smith, with his friend Elder Ray, had flogged at suffrage meetings, churches, conventions, temperance rallies, and fundraisers all over metropolitan New York. They had envisioned a thoroughgoing outmigration of Black families to the wilderness; they signed up giftees everywhere they went. Yet McCune Smith had never been there. How this wild country looked, how it smelled, what it felt like underfoot, remained a mystery. Hard as it was to wrest the days from his practice and an ailing daughter, he had to make this trip. It was time—well past—to put the Black Arcadia of his imaginings to the test.
Smith’s traveling companion would be William P. Powell, who also had a stake in Gerrit Smith’s initiative. The proprietor of Manhattan’s Colored Sailor’s Home, Powell had urged Black seamen to try Adirondack farming. He owned a gift deed himself.1
Their visit was well timed. In early fall, the great woods already winked with color. On either side of the rough road, ferns and bracken made a low surf of yellow-green. Swamp maples stretched and flared, and here and there reared up those high-shouldered boulders called erratics, remnants of the glaciers that once rolled over this domed plateau. Smith, a man of science who had studied medicine in Scotland and France and was a lay scholar of climatology and geography, was entirely enthralled. He may have recalled a verse or two from one of his favorite poets, Robert Burns. But when “Nature’s poet” wrote, “Here is the glen, and here the bower / All underneath the birchen shade,” he invoked another world. Burns’s “woodlark in the grove” would not have lasted long in the cool, brooding Adirondack woods.
And then their coachman lost his way. The doctor made light of it in his letter later on, but getting lost was hardly trivial. A chance encounter with a bear, a rattler, a white person with an aversion to Black skin—these could make for complications. Happily, a white local got them back on track, and in time, the doctor would assure Smith with a sigh, “I … would gladly exchange this bustling anxious life for the repose of that majestic country, could I see the way clear to a livelihood for myself and family. I felt myself a lord indeed beneath the lofty spruce and maple and birch, and by the [tr]awling brook, which your deed made mine.”2
But McCune Smith was not a lord, and Gerrit Smith was not his king. And after the physician did his duty—made his gratitude as plain as he knew how—he got down to the task at hand. What was happening on the gift land? What could he report? “We found in North Elba,” he wrote, “about sixty colored persons in all, of all ages and sex… . As a general thing the parties had not enough money at the outset and had failed in making up the deficiency partly from the backwardness of the season and partly from having waited too long for Mr. John Brown’s team. They were however cheerful, many of them hardy and industrious; a fine talk they made too, about their feeling of independence, when I fear they were a little too dependent upon Mr. Brown’s meal bin.” But several grantees already had cabins up, and the writer was quite confident that before the end of fall they would “make a fair fallow.” The wave of settlers who came in May and June of 1849 had fanned new life out of the coals, and this revival the doctor noted with relief. “I think more clearing had been done within a year in [Township] 12 than in any three years together of late,” he wrote.3
He and Powell would not meet the abolitionist sheep farmer. When they arrived, John Brown was on his way to London and then the Continent, hoping to get a good price for his wool. Brown and his family were also part of this energizing second wave. In Westport, the Browns had met up with the teamster-grantee Samuel Jefferson from Troy, whom Brown had enlisted to haul his family to a farmhouse on Cascade Road he was leasing from its owner. The road was rocky and they took it slow ( Jefferson’s confident, attentive pacing of Brown’s newly purchased team won him side work with this family for some years). Brown himself got busy straightaway redoing the grantees’ sloppy surveys—good news for them, and a good way, too, for Brown to make himself familiar in the community and get a feeling for which of his Black neighbors might want to help him in his great antislavery work to come.4
Portrait of John Brown. Daguerreotype, 1847–49. Augustus Washington, photographer, Springfield, MA. Courtesy of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. Gift of the Hall Family Foundation in Honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008.
Already, some were becoming family friends, a visitor to their household would observe. In this same summer of 1849, the Boston lawyer and adventurer Richard Henry Dana Jr. went climbing in the Adirondacks, lost his way, and wound up, famished and exhausted, at Brown’s small home, where he was calmly welcomed, fully fed, and introduced to “Mr. Jefferson and Mrs. Wait,” Brown’s Black friends and neighbors. Dana was an antislavery man but entirely unused to hearing white people address Black people so respectfully. And the next day, stopping by the Browns’ to say goodbye before heading home to Boston, his amazement grew. Here were the white farm family and their new Black neighbors “all at the table together”—as if this were something usual, something everyday!—tucking into a feast of “meat, substantial and wholesome, large quantities of the best of milk, good bread & butter, Indian meal cakes & maple molasses.” (Twenty-two years later in the Atlantic, the esteemed author of Twelve Years before the Mast recalled it in his essay “How We Met John Brown.”)5
McCune Smith and Powell met more Black settlers at a prayer meeting at the North Elba inn and home of the venerable pioneer “good old Deacon Osgood,” who (his deep-dyed Congregationalism notwithstanding) conducted the service according to Smith’s own “Peterboro platform” of antislavery Bible politics. That was hopeful, and so was a visit to “Mr. Henderson, a shoe-maker from Troy, [who] had his sign hanging out (the first and only in the township) and appeared to drive a good business.” The agent also saluted the homesteaders, unnamed, in Townships 11 and 10, “making the woods ring with the music of their axe strokes.”6
But much more of McCune Smith’s report spoke of failure and defeat. Samuel Drummond had dumped his wife and children and made a beeline back to the city. Benjamin Landrine, not finding water on his gift lot or a second one, had also backtracked “in despair.” The city was a siren, and the grantees lacked the numbers and the confidence to resist it. “Could we get about 200 settlers in North Elba, and then cut off all communication with the city (burn the galleys) things could be made to prosper,” the doctor sighed. A more remote frontier would have forced a commitment; the settlers would not have had a choice.7
Did McCune Smith meet more pioneers than these? They were certainly around. In “greater” Timbuctoo, the Hasbrook family from the Hudson Valley had settled in the shadow of South Mountain. Lyman Eppes from Troy, whose name and family would dominate reports of the Black Woods for another hundred years, had brought his clan to land just south of North Elba, and in his home (until they built their own) were the Dicksons, Henry and Hannah, an older couple also out of Troy. More Trojans, William and Eliza Carasaw and their three boys, were a brisk walk through the woods. Not yet arrived were the childless couple, Isaac and Jane Craig, who would trundle over from a tiny town in Jefferson County. (Of Smith’s three thousand grantees, the Craigs were the only ones to find the Black Woods from points west.)8
Lyman E. Eppes, North Elba. Photographer unknown, n.d. Courtesy Special Collections, Feinberg Library, SUNY Plattsburgh, NY.
Lewis Pierce, the self-emancipated slave who found his freedom in Philadelphia may have fixed on his chosen lot this early, and begun dropping trees for his new shoebox of a cabin in the Cascade district, and not far from Pierce, the grantee Tommy Brown, who bunked a while in the Cascade home of the early pioneer Robert Scott, might have started limbing trees on the lot that suited him much more the one he had been gifted. (And the so-called Tommy Brown lot was remembered long after the grantee had slipped from view. North Elbans were helping themselves to still-usable timber from his abandoned cabin as late as 1877.)9
What became of Tommy Brown? Or John and Margaret Vinson, who lived briefly with the Dicksons, or old Mrs. Wait, who worked as a live-in helper for the Browns? No surviving stories help us guess where they went next. In the summer of 1849, John Brown’s son Owen labored with a grantee, Samuel “Pappa” Hall, to raise “a fine log house” near Timbuctoo. When Hall left and the house started to break down, John Brown urged other grantees to either occupy it or salvage saw boards before they rotted. The thrifty Yankee abhorred needless waste.10
A Distracted Witness
A modest colony now occupied the woods of Franklin to the north, where McCune Smith may have met John Thomas, parishioner of the doctor’s early schoolmate, Henry Highland Garnet. Thomas, the Maryland grantee whose letter to Gerrit Smith revealed his many years in bondage, was on Lot 284, with Mary Ann, their boy Richard, six, and their baby, Charlotte Ann. Their potato patch was seeded, their fields tall with hay, and not far at all were other families, many also Southern-born and newly come from Troy. One was the Maryland-born William Moore, whose farmstead may have straddled the long stream that would take the name of Negro Brook. His grantee-neighbors, Perry Weeks and Wesley Murray, were Marylanders too. To John Thomas’s northeast was the Virginia-born newsman-turned-pioneer Willis Hodges, now bunking with the youthful Morehouses, Stephen and Lura (or, census-depending, Laney or Lara), their young teen Warren, already enrolled in school, and his big sister, Jane. On the Essex County–Franklin County line was a homesteader-grantee from New York City, the aging widower Daniel Thompson, who got his deed when he was living in Elizabethtown, the Essex County seat.11
Duane, another of Franklin County’s undersettled towns and closer to Malone to the north, was now home to the grantees Richard Willson and the Virginia-born Alexander Gordon, whose households expanded the Black Woods by twelve, or 5 percent of Duane’s head count in 1850. In his memoir, Willis Hodges had claimed these Brooklyn pioneers for Blacksville (Duane’s boundary with Franklin was maybe five miles west of Loon Lake). It seems Hodges understood the reach of his dispersed community in terms as generous as the scattered settlement of Timbuctoo. And these settlers, too, were squatting (Gerrit Smith gave away no land in Duane). Not by title but through labor would they claim their homes.12
But these settlers were not noted in McCune Smith’s confiding letter. His anecdote about the shoemaker Henderson aside, he gave no details about new homes. He may have thought, Why bother? Anecdotes about a light scattering of pioneers hardly evidenced the avid, lush, migration Gerrit Smith wanted. And it was the land agent’s unhappy task to let Smith know that if it hadn’t happened yet, it likely wouldn’t. No wonder McCune Smith waited six months after he was home before he sent Smith his report. He had delayed, he wrote, because of a personal calamity. His young daughter had died of a consuming illness on Christmas Eve. Smith himself had lost young children; the doctor knew he’d understand. But even if there weren’t a family tragedy, this would have been a hard letter to write. Sixty pioneers! Set against the wished-for three thousand, the number was a travesty. The doctor sketched a hopeful scene, but the great ranks of the missing—the men who said they’d come, who hoped to come and bring their families, and didn’t come—monopolized the view.13
If McCune Smith could have put aside his and Gerrit Smith’s expectations and judged this modest influx on its own terms, for where it was and what it meant, he might have left the woods with better news. In a few years’ time, a handful of all-white Adirondack hamlets had been integrated. White farmers in North Elba, St. Armand, Duane, and Franklin, whose sole acquaintance with Black Americans were the pranksters and buffoons they met in syndicated race columns in their newspapers, now schooled their children with the sons and daughters of Black neighbors. They learned these neighbors’ names at the gristmill, and sang hymns with them in church. Years before, McCune Smith had told Gerrit Smith that he felt the only way white racism could be dislodged was by “mind-work,” face to face, eye to eye, at so deep a place it would need to seem “molecular.” Political or legal victories were not enough. The very hearts of white people “needed to be changed, thoroughly, entirely, permanently changed.” In the Black Woods, a world still evolving, still unfixed, was a stage intimate enough to let this happen. But this, McCune Smith couldn’t see.14
The Things They Did Instead
The doctor’s letter, which held the last thoughts he would care to share about the giveaway of 1846, revealed another blind spot too. While McCune Smith took pains to explain to Smith just why he could not move his family to the Black Woods, he made no such effort for the deedholders. He judged their absence without examining the reasons for it. In his view, the settlers simply lacked confidence and courage to resist the blandishments of city life. In fact, the grantees had good reasons for not moving, reasons myriad enough to pack a volume. This is not that book. But if only for a few pages, we might consider what the grantees were doing instead of going on their gift land, lest we, too, be moved to dismiss them as mere no-shows who missed their chance.
Jonathan Mingo, a hardworking suffrage activist from Flushing in Long Island, was by Charles Ray’s lights “one of the most enterprising of the grantees.” This “sterling man and … excellent farmer” had signed up twenty men for gift deeds, and cared enough about his gift lot to visit it in 1847. When he found it down to fire-blackened stumps, he asked Smith for a new lot, which Smith provided. But Mingo’s farm experience, so valued by Ray, was a double-sided flint: if it lit up Mingo’s interest in his gift land, it also sparked his interest in better land out west. A web of trans-Appalachian railroad lines, steamship routes, and latitudinal canals now hitched the Atlantic Ocean to the Northwest Territory and beyond. Telegraph lines flanked railroad tracks, and wires sang with news of soil conditions, weather, land prices, and crop sales. In six days, Mingo could get from New York to anywhere in the nation except Texas and the far West. While race laws in western territories and states were daunting, their enforcement varied wildly from state to territory. As the geographer D. W. Meinig observes, the midcentury census revealed Black people living in almost every county in the country, proving that “exclusion laws were never fully effective.” There was room for emigration if destinations were picked with care.15
In southern Michigan’s Lenawee County just north of Ohio, land was low and lush, and the Quaker-founded antislavery community was long entrenched (and some of those old pioneers had come from Mingo’s own Flushing). Sometime before 1850, Mingo’s family moved to Lenawee’s Raisin Township. Jonathan and his oldest boy found day work; the younger Mingos went to integrated schools. Next came Albion in Calhoun County, where Mingo got his farm. On his death in 1869, this “well known and highly esteemed” citizen was remembered by his minister as “a man of good judgment in business matters, unswervingly honest, and a devoted, consistent Christian.” Four years later, the lane in Albion that ran along the family farm was named Mingo Street. It is there still.16
How many Smith grantees held out, like Mingo, for better opportunities? The minister and newspaper publisher Samuel Cornish chided Smith for not giving him a lot (had this agrarian not been urging Black New Yorkers to take up farming for decades?). But when he received his forty acres in Florence, Cornish did not occupy it but made instead for Johann Sutter’s California mill race in the High Sierra, where the riverbanks were flecked with gold and all it took to make it yours was a pan, a pot, and a willow sieve. In 1849, the middle-aged reformer signed on with Black prospectors bound for Tuolumne County’s Dragoon Gulch. Also sailing to the Gold Coast were Newport Henry, Jonas Townsend, Philip Bell, James M. Whitfield, and Edward Johnson, all “uplift” men of repute, and every one a Smith grantee. They had read about their fellow activist (and grantee) Reuben Ruby making $600 a month on the Stanislaus River, and the thirty-seven Black New Englanders, not a year in San Francisco, who each were pulling in $300 monthly. These Black Yankees had organized a welcoming committee and an aid group for just-arrived Black miners. Had anybody done this for the Adirondack pioneers? “This is the best place for Black folks on the globe,” a Black prospector wrote his wife in 1852. “All a man has to do is work, and he will make money.” What Black Adirondack settler could claim as much? Newport Henry and Jonas Townsend joined a mining group from New York City (“Whites are not admitted,” the Adirondack Essex County Reporter marveled). On the ship, the Hampden, they sailed to California the same fall that McCune Smith and William Powell went to the Adirondacks to vet the Smith grantees.17
For a century after the giveaway, writers explaining the Black deedholders’ rejection of their gift land cited inexperience, fear of hardship, and their horror of the unknown. But first-time mining was at least as new to Black grantees as farming, and as daunting as the Adirondack woods. All things being equal, and all hard work being hard, why not choose the work that promised the best return?
Self-interest, not its opposite, explains why so many did not come. And for New York City’s working poor, the better part of self-interest was self-preservation. The biggest reason deedholders did not take up Smith’s offer of an Adirondack farm was its unaffordability. McCune Smith knew this, and even hinted at it in his letter, noting that “as a general thing,” the settlers “had not enough money at the outset.” He could have stopped the sentence there, but then he went on to suggest they might have “made up the deficiency” if they had been better prepared for winter and if they hadn’t “waited too long” for John Brown’s team. His judgments missed the mark. A poor working man in New York City would need to pay one-third of his yearly wages for a team of oxen in this era.18
Like Gerrit Smith, the Black agents had never farmed, not for themselves. Some had worked (and slaved) on farms as children, but this was not the same. Their vision of husbandry spoke more of an ideological infatuation than a concern with budget, costs, and how to pace the building of a successful farm. In the Adirondack Experience Library is the memoir of Charles Wardner, whose father, James, had moved to Franklin from the Champlain Valley in the 1850s, westering as confidently as James’s schoolteacher-father had hauled his family from Vermont across Lake Champlain fifty years before. Wardner’s memoir suggests how much about this kind of removal a Yankee pioneer could take for granted. A move from one region to another could not be managed in one swoop. First had to come the walkabout, noting soil types, water sources, mast trees, and so on. The next visit was for clearing, burning slash, and yanking stumps. Planting, and the getting up of cabins, fences, and woodsheds, all came after. Friendly locals, eager for new neighbors, might point a prospect to a shanty he could borrow while he sized up the terrain. Cash poor he may have been, but James Wardner’s eyes were rich in expertise. Southern Franklin County was land he knew how to read as closely as his Bible. High on a ridgeline with his brother on his third visit, he saw and claimed his future:
Less than a half mile away to the south east of us, we could see one of the finest stands of hardwood timber I had ever seen. “There,” I exclaimed to Seth, “is my future farm and where I want to build my home.” “What makes you so sure of it?” Seth wanted to know. “That looks like a tamarack swamp between here and that piece of hard wood.” “Where you find trees like those you also find good farming soil underneath them,” I told him. “I shall build my house on that rise of ground near that bunch of virgin white pine.” “But how about this swamp?” Seth asked. “You don’t want that in your door yard, do you?” “Don’t you see?” I argued. “We can build a dam on this stream and set the water back up here, to cover and make a lake of this entire swamp. See, there is a pond over to the right with an outlet flowing through the swamp and meeting this main stream right over there to your left. It couldn’t be a better place.”19
The downstate grantees could not amortize the steps of their migrations. A multistaged move was entirely beyond their means; it had to be one move or none. And more grantees than the farmer Jonathan Mingo understood this. Several “honest, industrious and sober” grantees from Little Falls could not wait to “go right upon the lands … and undertake the getting in of corn and potato crops,” a friend of Gerrit Smith had written him. Then they reconsidered. Not inexperience but its opposite was what kept them from moving north.20
In May 1849, Gerrit Smith gave away another four thousand acres to one thousand needy white New Yorkers in forty-acre lots. And this time, as if to flag a recognition of the poverty whose depth he had underestimated in 1846, the philanthropist enclosed ten dollars with each deed, explaining, “Where the land is worth removing to, and where there is a disposition to remove to it, this money will help defray the expense of removal. In perhaps every case, it will be sufficient to pay the two or three years’ taxes now due, and also the taxes for a number of years to come.” But if Smith had learned a lesson from the hobbled progress of his giveaway, it would not help his Black grantees, and it wouldn’t put white deedholders on their gift land either. Overwhelmingly, they, like his Black beneficiaries, were too disabled by the lack of capital to manage the migration.21
The Black grantees had taxes, too, and could have used a ten-dollar boost. But who among Smith’s agents would suggest the extra gift? To imply that he had not done enough—free land for three thousand!—would rouse the specter of Black ingratitude, which, to the proud, scrupulously gracious agents, was anathema. So there would be no tap for help, no beggar’s cup from McCune Smith, or from Frederick Douglass, who had written as boldly as he cared to about the settlers’ disabling poverty in January 1849. Gerrit Smith had not solicited the input of his Black friends when he shaped his plan. It was formed when he unveiled it, its terms hard set. McCune Smith saw trouble all along and tried, early on, to brace his rich friend for disappointment. He wouldn’t ask for more, not now, not after three years. It was time to walk away.22
Romance gave way to gritted pragmatism. No more sunny talk among the agents about moving to the woods. Stay where you’re needed, and fight the war at home. There were nights Charles and Charlotte Ray put up as many as fourteen runaways, weeks when the freedom seekers flowed in and out of their home without a break. James McCune Smith had told Gerrit Smith that his reason for not moving to the country was economic: he would move, he claimed, “could I see the way clear for a livelihood for myself & the family”—and he couldn’t. But a livelihood was just part of what city living gave him. At the Colored Orphan Asylum, he cared for children by the hundreds. He was needed. When white “progressives” trotted out their tired schemes to dispatch Black Americans to Africa (that bogey colonization, back from the dead), he drafted furious rebuttals for mass anticolonization meetings. Needed. Black children in the city perished at a disproportionately high rate, and his research was proving this. Needed. As much as a living wage kept him where he was, duty spoke as well. Charles Ray, Peter Vogelsang, George Downing, Charles Reason, James Pennington, William Wells Brown, James Gloucester, Alexander Crummell, Ulysses Vidal, Louis Bonaparte, John Zuille—these antislavery activists chose a “bustling anxious life” over their free land in the Black Woods for a reason. On isolated farms they could not do the good that city life enabled. The farmer’s life might bring the ballots, but city activists would lose their stage of public uplift and resistance. In an era when everything from slave catchers to Jim Crow conspired to yank Northern Blacks out of sight, out of mind, they would surrender visibility. Was this a time to disappear?23
McCune Smith would not give up on the country life entirely. At an 1851 convention, he still pled for Black New Yorkers to get out of the city. But no more would he exalt the transformative soul-shaping power of the woods. “Country life is the better life for our people; not consolidated, isolated country life, but a well-mixed country and village life,” he now believed. The trick was in the mix. Not just farms, but shops for carpenters and tailors and other businesses and workshops where Black people would not face exclusion “from general mechanical employment” or “white journeymen” who “refuse to work with us.” The eager echo here of Florence was hard to miss, but the doctor left that vexed memory unnamed.24